


Do Not Wrestle Against Flesh and Blood

by matchsticks_p (matchsticks)



Category: The Eagle | The Eagle of the Ninth (2011)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Succubi & Incubi, Ambiguous Relationships, Crack Treated Seriously, Dom/sub Undertones, Happy Gay Farmers (Eagle of the Ninth), Implied Relationship, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:01:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28122765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/matchsticks/pseuds/matchsticks_p
Summary: "What were those signals she made with her hands?""Protective wards," Esca replied."Protection against what?""Oh, you know," he said very off-handedly, "there are those from certain tribes who are frightened of my sex magic."Though they were standing unmoving, Marcus still stumbled, out of sheer surprise. Esca steadied him with a firm hand."Your what?"- - - - -Marcus has been missing some signs.
Relationships: Marcus Flavius Aquila/Esca Mac Cunoval
Comments: 37
Kudos: 145
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Do Not Wrestle Against Flesh and Blood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dr_zook](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dr_zook/gifts).



In the end, they remained near Calleva. 

After the giddiness of a new sense of freedom and endless possibility had worn off, after a few silly days of increasingly improbable daydreaming about setting off to sea or moving house to Egypt had worked themselves out of their systems, they had concluded that staying near made sense. Uncle Aquila was getting old, and he was the only family Marcus had left, not counting Esca. It would be honourable to remain close enough to offer any future assistance he might need, considering how much he had done for them both. 

And Esca couldn't deny that he felt freer in Britannia, close to the soil of his forefathers. The thought of seeing the grandness of Rome's grip on so many other lands held little attraction for him. So they bought farmland to the west of Calleva with Marcus's praemia, and taught themselves to use it well.

They ploughed the land for wheat, and Uncle Aquila supplied them with endless reading material about the best techniques for planting crops. They also bought sheep and horses to raise, one for wool and meat and the other for breeding to sell in the coming years. 

It was hard work, though in a way that reminded Marcus's body of the army. He ended each day with a bone-deep exhaustion he knew well from his soldiering days, and it wasn't unpleasant. 

There would be less work if they hired slaves, but Esca had an obvious distaste for the idea and Marcus respected his feelings on the matter. As such, without a woman in the kitchen, Marcus also took on the task of their cooking. It had seemed fair, and natural, as Esca usually did more than his fair share of physical labour due to the limitations of Marcus's leg. And so, though they were both tired, Marcus was less likely to fall asleep face-first into the fire and it became customary for him to be the one to toss vegetables and meats into a pot that needed watching.

Over time, he even became skilled at it, deriving an unnameable satisfaction from ladling stew into a bowl and watching Esca eat it, his lips shiny with broth and fat, his cool eyes glinting in the firelight.

"This is very good, Marcus," Esca said, sopping up the last of it with hard bread and licking his fingers.

Marcus's gaze tracked his tongue and his stomach warmed at the praise. He ducked his head quickly to finish the last of his own meal, murmuring some vague agreement.

The same feeling crept into the core of him sometimes when he fetched water for Esca's ablutions. Esca, incorrigible northern barbarian that he was, did not care for Roman baths, which Marcus complained endlessly about being his only unforgivable flaw. But it wasn't that Esca was unclean. Rather, he just preferred the briskness of a washcloth dipped in cold water, even on winter days when Marcus had to break the thin ice over their pond in order to get it.

"It's refreshing," Esca said, laughing at Marcus's expression of open dismay.

"It's uncivilized," Marcus said, pinched. 

Esca grinned with sharp teeth and shucked his braccae to clean himself below, not caring if Marcus looked.

He used to watch furtively, when Esca washed himself, but Esca had long since made it clear that he didn't mind. There were plenty of ways for privacy to be obtained and yet he always performed his hygienic routine in open view of Marcus, almost like he preferred for Marcus to watch. And so Marcus's eyes took in the lean, familiar lines of Esca's body, drinking in the assurance that he was hale and hearty and there with him, and how his gaze lingered became another of the many things they never spoke of but took in stride.

When Marcus discovered a pattern of strange bruises in his most private area one day, he was mortified. Having no memory of how he got them, he assumed they were from himself, perhaps due to some over-zealous self-pleasure in his sleep. And though he was no longer such a prude that the act itself shamed him, he was shamed by the thought of disturbing Esca, for they often shared the same bed in the winter, for the warmth.

Used as they were to not hiding from each other when they washed or changed, Marcus knew that Esca would eventually see them. The marks came and went unpredictably, and Marcus lived in fear of waking up to discover that he had awoken Esca while inflicting them upon himself. 

But this fear never came to pass, and Esca never said a word about them, and so Marcus gradually stopped paying so much attention to the bruises himself. 

On a particularly rainy day, when they both had to go out to secure the pregnant ewes to prevent them from being lost to the mud, Marcus lost his footing and slipped with a cry. Esca gripped him by the upper arm to keep him from falling onto his bad leg. His grasp was strong, strong enough to prevent him from injury and strong enough to bruise.

They bloomed dark the next day, five finger shaped spots that were reminiscent of the occasional bruises he had almost forgotten to be embarrassed by. Waiting until Esca went out to check on the horses, Marcus pressed his own fingers to the contusions left by Esca's care and touched himself quickly, roughly, before Esca returned.

* * *

At the market in Calleva, where they went to sell their wool and stock up on supplies every few weeks, an old woman saw Esca and drew back in alarm.

She looked Pictish, tattoos still bold on wrinkled skin, and she hurried away from Marcus and Esca while muttering to herself and drawing signs in the air with her hands. Then, seeming to decide that wasn't enough, she drew out a dried flower from her satchel and waved it around herself before tucking it under her clothes, against her chest. The crowd closed in between them after that, and she disappeared from their view.

Marcus would have assumed she was particularly traditional and had performed an obscurely elaborate insult towards Romans had he not been certain that she had kept her eyes on Esca the whole time.

At his side, Esca was also looking in the direction she had trailed off, he with a half amused quirk at the corner of his lips. Eager always to learn the ways of Esca's people and those similar to them, Marcus asked, "What were those signals she made with her hands?"

"Protective wards," Esca replied.

"Protection against what?"

"Oh, you know," he said very off-handedly, "there are those from certain tribes who are frightened of my sex magic."

Though they were standing unmoving, Marcus still stumbled, out of sheer surprise. Esca steadied him with a firm hand.

"Your what? I'm sorry, I don't understand." Perhaps it was something lost in translation… 

"I don't know what your people call it in Latin," Esca began, and yes, it must be an issue of language that would become simple and clear once Esca explained, "but I am one of those who feed from sexual energy."

"What?" Marcus repeated. He tried to grasp for any other word but failed entirely. "What?"

"You know, some are just born this way. Surely you have heard of this, Rome's empire is so vast that you must know at least a few people like me."

Marcus frowned at him in open incomprehension. He had heard stories of demons that did as Esca described, gained sustenance from…disreputable nighttime excursions, but not people. Certainly not people he knew.

He wasn't sure what his face showed, and he was even less sure what conclusions Esca drew from it, for Esca forged on to say, "Some of the more superstitious tribes fear it, but I assure you that it is nothing to be scared of. In my tribe, it is considered an unusual but harmless condition."

So saying, he put a hand onto the back of Marcus's neck and squeezed. Marcus leaned into the touch instinctively, baffled by the onslaught of new information. Of course he wasn't _scared_ of Esca—the very idea was absurd, impossible. But he had many questions, which he felt pressured not to ask at the moment by the throngs of people surrounding them in the busy market square, going about their days without revelations that the person they had chosen to bind themselves to possibly for the rest of their lives had been a sex magic creature all along.

Whatever Esca found in his eyes made him smile, and squeeze Marcus's nape again. Marcus offered no resistance when he nudged him to continue walking.

* * *

Naturally, he never could find a better time to bring up his questions.

The more it sat undiscussed between them, the more the questions evolved. Was it his duty, as the patron of his freedman, to make sure Esca was well fed in that regard? Should he offer use of his hands, his thighs? Or should he arrange for Esca to meet with others? Would it hurt them? Esca had claimed to be harmless, but they didn't have access to neighbours for miles around. 

Merely turning the various possibilities over in his head made Marcus's face so hot that he swore Esca could see traces of redness hours later, when he returned from exercising the horses. 

Realizing he was not up to the task of navigating this path alone, Marcus consulted a priestess for guidance next time they went into town. 

He made an excuse to Esca about private religious matters so he could go alone, and Esca teased him fondly about his devoutness. Blush still on his cheeks as a result of Esca's half smirk, Marcus asked the priestess breathlessly about the appropriate conduct around such demons.

She explained to him the different types and provenances of incubi and succubi, and the steps to take to ward off each. 

Marcus quickly glanced around to make sure no one was within hearing distance before stuttering out, as quietly as possible, "No, I mean, hypothetically of course, how might one……feed one?"

The longer she stared at him in silence, the more Marcus felt like his hands didn't belong to him, so little did he know what to do with them. He scratched the back of his neck, then folded his arms and tucked his hands into his armpits, then fiddled with his satchel, then fixed his hair, and was about to move on to inspecting his fingernails when she finally said, tight and clipped, "I can direct you to a male priest of Mithras. He can help you find the best way to ask for guidance of your soul towards virtue and of your body towards a brothel."

Marcus stayed a moment longer, just long enough for the bone-deep desire to curl into a ball and die to pass, before muttering a thanks and tossing her a few coins as he hurried away.

He spent the rest of the day drowning in worry that word of his perversion would now spread throughout Calleva, though rationally he knew that priests and priestesses would have no trade if they ever shared even the most mundane things told to them. He had felt belittled by her judgemental gaze, belittled and misunderstood, but was it a misunderstanding at all or had she really seen the true heart of what he was asking?

The journey back home passed in a haze, and he was so preoccupied with his burning thoughts at dinner that he was not himself and Esca became worried. 

"Marcus, is something the matter? Are you alright?" he asked, pressing the back of his hand to Marcus's forehead as though Marcus were a child who needed his temperature checked.

Marcus normally enjoyed having Esca fuss over him, but his wretchedness ruined that pleasure and he finally could no longer contain the worries that had plagued him ever since the revelation of Esca's nature. 

"Are _you_ alright?" he blurted out. "Are you terribly hungry? Are you in misery?" _Is it my fault?_ went unasked.

Esca cocked his head to the side and looked at Marcus. In that moment it felt impossible that Marcus had ever mistaken him for a normal man rather than a creature touched by stranger powers.

"No. Why should I be?" Esca did not take his hand away, merely slid it from Marcus's forehead down the side of his face and neck to rest on his shoulder.

"You haven't…fed. You have not been with others, and I do not provide you with…" Marcus trailed off, unable to finish.

"You provide me with plenty," Esca said, the grip of his fingers turning sharp in a way that felt familiar.

"I don't understand."

"I can feed upon energy rather the act of sex itself," he offered in explanation. "And you put out a lot of energy."

Marcus flushed, and then watched at close range as Esca's pupils dilated. "Yes, just like that," Esca murmured, and it made Marcus hot in places he could not name. "You do a lot to take care of me, Marcus. You take very good care of me."

Marcus leaned his heated cheek against Esca's hand, and shuddered with the truth of it as Esca's sharp-toothed smile washed over him.

**Author's Note:**

> Much thanks to my dear Adi_Rotynd for the title help (taken from a bible verse about demons and raging "against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places," you know, as Marcus is not interested in doing) and for the general help with this fic and like....all things. To my Yuletide recipient: I studied your likes and dislikes thoroughly and combined several of them with several prompts, perhaps not in an entirely standard way but I still hope it was enjoyable for you! Thank you for the fun prompts and for the opportunity to write for you in this, my NINTH (wtf) Yuletide!  
> To everyone who read this: thank you, I appreciate you.


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